Our institute employs more than 25 members, including 17 PhD students. The members are specialists with different academic backgrounds like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, mechatronics and physics.

Through effective cooperation, their interdisciplinary teamwork results in new and innovative solutions. Different machines, such as the unique hydraulic, electromagnetic and piezoelectric actuators, different biologically-inspired walking machines (two-legged, six-legged and eight-legged mechanisms), a modular redundant agricultural manipulator, a sophisticated multi-fingered hand, a parallel kinematical motion platform, to name just a few, have been developed over the years.

The research results have been published in journal papers, congresses, and exhibitions (e.g. several times at the Hannover fair), but they have also been telecast on popular science programs. The entire list of publications can be found at our website.

The robotics group of our institute, aiming for taking part at the European Robotics challenge, currently consists of 6 PhD students and 1 PostDoc. The group is working on 2 major projects: the humanoid walking robot LOLA and the modular, multipurpose agricultural manipulator CROPS.

Both projects take leverage a number of in-house software libraries and programs, which provide efficient calculation of forward and inverse kinematics for redundant systems, path planning strategies, collision avoidance based on swept-sphere volumes, dynamical simulations, model-based control algorithms and visualization tools.

The code and algorithms from collision avoidance to matrix-vector operations were developed and implemented at our institute. Recently, RGB-D devices have been integrated using the OPENCV library into our robot systems: The humanoid robot LOLA is able to detect obstacles on the floor enabling walking in rough terrain (see video attachment #3).

For demonstration purposes of our agricultural manipulator, an advanced fruit detection and localization algorithm for sweet-pepper fruit models has been implemented (see video attachment #1). Within the EU-project CROPS, we gained insight into the robotic middleware ROS and its peripherals.

Our team has considerable knowledge and experience in inverse kinematics for redundant systems, potential field-, optimal control- and sampling based motion planning techniques as well as fast distance calculation for obstacle avoidance.

For harvesting fruits with the agricultural manipulator, basic grasp planning problems have been considered.